A Virginia school board will soon be omitting the video display of the public speaking portion of its meetings, starting on April 9.
The Loudoun County School Board voted 6-3 on Tuesday with the objections coming from board members Deana Griffiths, Kari LaBell, and Lauren Shernoff.
When Griffiths brought forward a motion Tuesday night to bring back the display of public speakers’ faces on camera during meetings, the board voted to do away with the cameras. Currently, meetings have been showing the back of public speakers in a wide shot of the school board meeting.
The video stream of meetings, starting in April, will provide only the audio and closed captioning of public speakers at meetings.
“It is crucial for livestreams, recordings, or broadcasts to provide a clear and engaging representation of the speaker for the audience,” Griffiths said at the meeting.
Fellow school board member April Chandler disagreed with the cameras showing the faces of public speakers because she believed it brought media attention to the board.
“I will not support any effort to turn the cameras back on. I’m open to changing the format in other ways, but turning the cameras back on now only invites and undermines the work of the school board and the transparency of the school board,” Chandler said.
“How about LCPS just quit doing stupid stuff & there won’t be anything newsworthy to report?” a Loudoun parent group said on social media.
The Loudoun County School Board meetings have infamously garnered national media attention when parents gave passionate speeches before the board regarding their rights. The parent rights movement in Loudoun County battled masking, reopening schools, inappropriate children’s books, the handling of sexual assaults in schools, gender ideology, and critical race theory.
Loudoun County parents, such as Brandon Michon, also went viral in 2021 for their passionate speeches before the board to press for the reopening of schools following the coronavirus pandemic.
The board meeting’s livestream previously showed on camera the faces of public speakers, who were generally parents and students, in addition to school board members during public comments until June 2021.
During the June 22, 2021 meeting, Loudoun father Scott Smith was arrested for obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct for a verbal confrontation at the meeting. Smith attended the meeting to speak out about his teenage daughter being sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgender student He was later pardoned in September 2023 by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin. The same meeting had brought out many parents expressing concerns about Policy 8040, a proposal that would allow transgender students to use bathrooms according to their preferred gender identity. Following this meeting, the school board took the cameras off of the parents’ faces as they were speaking before the board to limit to media attention.
School board member Anne Donahue spoke out against turning the cameras on Tuesday night.
“I think there unfortunately has been a history the last few years of people who are outspoken in this forum of later being harassed,” Donahue said. “I’m not comfortable with agreeing to a mechanism that might cause that to continue to be a problem.”
Ian Prior, a Loudoun County father who had been targeted by Loudoun officials for his commentary as a frequent speaker, reacted to the school board’s efforts to limit visuals of public speakers.
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“With every statement from this school board and the supporters on this platform, they build an evidentiary record that this is at least a content-based restriction, and more likely a viewpoint-based one,” Prior said.
Former school board member Tiffany Polifko, like Griffiths, had also attempted to reinstate the practice of showing speakers’ faces last fall, but failed to get the effort passed.
